Truth and Beauty

Is truth and beauty what this book is really about? Going into it, I knew that the book, by Ann Patchett, was about her friendship with fellow writer, Lucy Grealy. Patchett and Grealy became friends at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to both become successful authors. Patchett wrote Bel Canto, which I loved, and Grealy became famous for her book, Autobiography of a Face, the incredible story of disfigurement that accompanied the successful (in terms of saving her life) treatment of Ewing’s sarcoma when she was a child.

I expected to be inspired, awed, by the truth and beauty of their friendship, but instead I was mystified and somewhat sickened. Yes, their love for each other was intense; but what comes through even more strongly than that is the fact that Lucy was a master manipulator and sucked the life out of the friends around her. She was one of those people who demands and receives the ardent admiration, love, and support of her friends; but nothing they do for her is ever enough. She extracts everything she can, yet they keep coming back for more. Why? Was is because Lucy shined so brightly that her friends wanted to bask in her brilliance, hoping that some of it would rub off? Did people feel such empathy and admiration for all she had gone through that they would allow her to get away with anything? It certainly seemed that Lucy endured countless terrible, mutilating surgical procedures that one would only expect to read about in a horror novel. But in the end, Patchett explains her loyalty to Lucy this way: “Even when Lucy was devastated or difficult, she was the person I knew best in the world, the person I was the most comfortable with. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker."

So maybe there is truth and beauty there.